Swirling clouds over the South Pacific

16 November 2009

Rosetta's OSIRIS imaging system spotted an anticyclone over the South Pacific on the morning of 13 November. The images show the scene roughly as a human eye would see it.

Cloud structures over the South Pacific, seen with the OSIRIS Imaging System’s narrow-angle camera on 13 November at 06:48 CET. The clouds are part of an anticyclone that is visible close to the centre of the image below.

This false-colour composite was generated from the orange, green and blue optical colour filters. It depicts a portion of the scene below with five times the resolution.

Zooming out...

Taken three minutes before the image above, this image is shown in a logarithmic scale to bring out details in the varying light intensity. As a result the scene looks roughly the same as it would appear to the unaided human eye.

In greyscale

The same area in the South Pacific imaged with the orange filter of the narrow-angle camera and depicted in a logarithmic intensity scale.